Windows 8.1 Upgrade: Step-By-Step

If you're upgrading from Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows RT, Windows 8.1 Preview, Windows 8.1 Pro Preview or Windows RT 8.1 Preview, the process is basically the same: You launch the Upgrade installer from Windows Store, run the installer while the PC or device is offline, reboot a few times, and then emerge with the OS upgraded. Here's a visual guide to this process.

Note: The only major difference between these installs, aside from the installer download size, is that those with Windows 8.1 or RT 8.1 Preview will need to reinstall all of their Metro-style apps and desktop applications when the upgrade is complete.

Windows 8.1/Windows 8.1 Pro/Windows RT 8.1. This landing page will help you trigger the downloading of the Windows 8.1 installer.

Installer downloads. Oddly, you don't see this screen, or any download progress, with Windows RT.

App reinstall warning. If you were using a Preview version of Windows 8.1 or Windows RT 8.1, you'll be warned that you will need to reinstall your apps after the upgrade is complete.

Restart required. Tap Restart Now to begin the upgrade. Otherwise, it will happen automatically after a timer expires.

Installation. Your PC will reboot and begin the install process.

Installation continues. Your PC could reboot 2-3 times in total as install completes.

Out of box experience. Once Windows 8.1 has installed, the PC will reboot and you will need to step through an out of box wizard in which you will agree to the license terms, choose between Express settings and a more manual configuration, sign in to your Microsoft account, and agree to use SkyDrive.

App installs. Once that process is complete, Windows 8.1 will install its default app set and links to your previously-installed Metro-style apps so you can manually install them afterwards.

Done. When everything is complete, you will be presented with the improved Windows 8.1 Start screen.

I've just update my PC to 8.1.My only problem is as it's download i don't have a physical copy of it.I know i can create images from the control panel,but what about people who don't know how to create one and their hard drive dies? How do they reinstall it ??

The installation went smoothly. My only issue was that it remained at "applying changes" for 2 hours. Eventually I looked at network activity and saw that it was downloading something at only 300kbps. This is where the minimalist design of Metro bothers me -- some sort of progress report would help. I imagine some design guru decided that "downloaded XX KB of YYY KB" is too technical or "busy" for the average user.

I'm considering the upgrade from Win 8 on some desktops that have quite a few desktop applications and tools installed, and have all the default Tileworld apps uninstalled (tile menu is completely blank except for the desktop icon). I keep the tile menu blank so as to not confuse any users who stumble into it from desktop.

I also have Windows 8 Pro with media center on an HP DM4-1130US , the 8.1 compatibility assistant says I have a non-compatible laptop, that it seems to think I am installing from a USB drive. When I run either the 8 or 8.1 compatibility assistant, it says 'This PC doesn't meet system requirements.. You can't install Windows on a USB flash drive from Setup' ???? This happens also if I try to install from the APP store. I also do not have BitLocker on this laptop. From the APP store it trys to download but gets to about 51% and then this same message appears. Anyone have any ideas about how to load this 8.1 piece of crap??

Have Windows Pro updated on my ThinkPad, flawless and kept 99% of all my apps. Got wind of this 'early' release at 11:00am Eastern and downloaded in no time. I waited until about 2:00pm to start upgrading the desktop, it is now almost 8:00pm and not even 50% downloaded. Guess other couple of million windows users caught on to this too.

I did the upgrade from Windows 8 Pro to 8.1 on one of my work PC's today and it was a very smooth process. I got to spend a little time trying out a few of the new features and they seem to work well. I just hope that Microsoft can overcome some of the negative image associated with Windows 8 with this new release. I just wonder if they should have changed to a totally different name....

Since Microsoft INSISTS on tricking you into thinking there's no way to use a local account (when actually all you have to do is disconnect from the Internet during setup or enter bogus credentials before it FINALLY gives you the option to do that) does anyone know how to revert a Microsoft Account to a local account? (I swear, it's like they're trying to sully an otherwise great release with crappy options like blowing away all of your apps and not letting you use accounts like you want to).

Tried twice to upgrade 8.0 Pro wi WMC and twice it failed with this error http://twitpic.com/dhqbly I never even go to see license agreement. Rollback also had problems restoring rights to user\username\desktop folder. Had to traverse the user folder and allowed progress bar on top of Windows Exploer to go across before I regained my Windows Desktop. Also Metro apps would not run properly after the restoring of Win8 by upgrade.

I was really looking forward to this upgrade. The upgrade itself was no problem. But IE 11 is worse than IE 10!! It is junk!! Sites that I have been using for years are clunky, but run quite well on Firefox and Chrome. To add insult to injury, some of Microsoft's own products are incompatible and disabled. There is no excuse for the basics-- What is their Problem?

When I first went into the store, the upgrade was labeled as "Windows 8.1 Preview" on my Surface RT. After I rebooted (CTRL-ALT-DEL anyone?) and went back into the store, the update was properly labeled.

Started the Upgrade Download from the Store when the Red Sox game started and left it. Came back about inning 3 and I was in the agreement pages! Install went super smooth. The ONLY issue I'm seeing is that my pinned files on the taskbar items such as word say the path is invalid. A great OS just became that much better! I hope there will be an iso available at some point. I just resist having the good old DVD image file nearby (Nostalgia!) :)

I found a way around this by accident. When it asks for the MS login, click the other button I think about using another account. On that screen try the continue button and it went past this without the login requirement.

What a day! I spent most of the day upgrading 1 RT tablet, to 8 Pro PC's and an 8 Pro tablet. The 8 Pro tablet download took some time but went okay. My first PC went very well but that's where it ended. The RT tablet pooped out during the download and never did let me install the upgrade. I finally had to reinstall the OS, run updates and then run the 8.1 upgrade. Took hours but worked. My last PC also keeps stopping on the download and I'm still struggling to get it to finish up. The download stops, starts, says it's starting the upgrade. Stops again and says it's now downloading again.
My biggest gripe is this being sent via the Windows Store. I'd much prefer an ISO download to run this from!

I have a new Del XPS laptop with Win 8 on it. I downloaded 8.1 and "installed" it. Actually the install went through everything and then rebooted into a black screen that all I can see is my mouse arrow roaming around.

This is a disaster, I have rebooted several times and it only boots up to a black screen. I guess I will have to find a way to reinstall Win 8, but I have no discs from Dell.

Paul,
I ran into a glitch where 8.1 upgrade will not install on my laptop with a solid state drive. I have Win 8 Pro running on an laptop with a SSD. When 8.1 tries to install an error popup says I cannot install the 8.1 upgrade to a USB drive. The SSD is the main internal drive. There is no external USB drive on the system. Any ideas on how to resolve?

Let's face it...this is "Windows 8 SE" All they had to do was sell an SE upgrade "disk" like they did with Windows 98SE. And have it upgrade whatever version you're already running: 8, 8Pro, 8ProMC, even RT. One size fits all. Where is Bill Gages when we need him?

1.) On my RT tablet, there's a watermark telling me 'secureboot isn't configured correctly." This is a plain vanilla Dell tablet, I did not run the preview on it, haven't hacked it, etc. There are a fair number of reports of this message popping up, and I'm guessing it's a bug.

2.) Trying to use reading list, but can't make it work. I find an article I want to save to the list, bring up the charms bar, go to "share," but there's no reading list showing.

Paul, I installed with my dreamspark account so I had to use my dreamspark key, however now I want to switch back to my Win 8 Pro key that I was using prior to entering the dreamspark key so I can use that Dreamspark on another computer. Can you find out why it wont let me change the key back, it says the key doesn't work.

It looks like there's a serious flaw in the Windows 8.1 installation program. I have Windows and my applications installed on my C: drive (SSD) and my data on my D: drive (a traditional hard disk). When I tried to upgrade to 8.1, I got an error saying that it couldn't upgrade my computer because Windows was installed on a different partition.

In my case, the process took 3 and a half hours for my main machine, but a majority of it requires no interaction from you: you can quite honestly go out and take care of business or just enjoy a day off while it does the bulk of the updating.

My only complaint was that when you re-authorize the computer to work with your Microsoft account, which isn't bad itself, but in my case, caused a few annoyances.It wants to send a normal security code to either your phone, or an alternate email, which would normally not be a big deal. Problem is, my alt email is on my personal website, and it was annoying to access from my laptop. I had forgotten to change my number in my account, so, that wasn't an option.

Yep. Minor annoyance on my part, but with my main machine down in the upgrade process, it was a little annoying. Just a heads up to those who read this, make sure your info is good before you continue.

I have upgraded two PC's and a laptop to Windows 8.1. Both PC's are fine, but the laptop, an Acer Aspire 5920 can no longer use its Intel pro/wireless 3945abg network adapter, due to a clash between Windows 8.1 and it's driver. I have tried the latest drivers from Intel and Acer without any success.

Device manager says I have the best driver, yet makes no comment on the fact that it doesn't work. I thought Windows 8.1 was supposed to be finished? What am I supposed to do, wait for Intel to get round to testing its driver on 8.1 and fix it, or Microsoft to fix whatever they have done?

The funny thing is, I originally upgraded it from Windows Vista to Windows 8 with no issues at all; I thought that Windows 8.1 was just supposed to be a minor upgrade. My advice is if you have an Acer Aspire wait a while before upgrading to Windows 8.1. I didn't make a system image, can I return to Windows 8?

Well, not much luck so far. Started the app and it made it thru "applying changes" on my 32 bit desktop using windows 8. Then it craps out with a message "something happened and Windows 8.1 couldn't be installed" Error code: 0x80070057. Any suggestions - I've tried everything for hours and all the updates are current.

On my laptop with 8.1 preview, I can't get to the store - everything else I can access without a problem.

This is a desaster: Samsung NP700 Series is hanging in a reboot-loop now. Update went normal until the restart. Cant be stupod, none of the Notebooks boot keys. EFI damaged? I guess i have to take the HD out and install Windows 8 again from a PC.

As usual: Microsoft convinience. I hope the Notebook is not bricked at all. Hurra Microsoft.

Ist verified now: Somehow i cannot install Windows 8 (not 8.1) on this Notebook anymore. Whatever Microsoft fucked up here, they fucked up badly. Ubuntu i can install, so it's not a hardware problem.

Oh, i regret so much, that was a .NET Developer in the past. Wanted only to test the compatibilty of some of my WPF apps. Luckily i have a MacBook with VMware Fusion where i can work from. No wait... I have to call the stupid Hotline to activate, because they tell me i have installed that Windows 8 License somewhere else (which i havent...). As usual all this DRM/Activation stuff mostly screws the paying customers.

Install was a bit painful on my desktop, but that was thanks to graphics driver and hardware issues. (LucidLogix Virtu, to be exact).

One thing that seems to have happened, though, is that 8.1 boots with a watermarked warning that SecureBoot is not configured correctly, whether or not your system supports it or has been set up to use it. Supposedly there will be a fix for that in the GA Rollup?

Otherwise, everything went smoothly on my Surface RT. It even seems to be a bit faster somehow.

After upgrading to Windows 8.1, I lost the up and down arrows in Yahoo Mail running in Firefox. There is no way to view the next or previous message without going back to the list of messages. I found a link for Firefox optimized for Yahoo, but it isn't available yet for Windows 8.1.

After installing 8.1, I cleaned it up by running the registry edit Disable Help Tips to get rid of the nuisance box with arrow at the top left and Autologon to kill the mandatory login every time you boot up. It was necessary to run FXVisor again to kill the arrows on shortcuts that came back in 8.1. 8.1 also changes the update settings to automatically install Windows updates, which I changed back download but don't install to keep Bing crap out of my computer. I updated Start8 and Gadgets8, which work well with Windows 8.1, restoring the functionality of Windows 7.

So, the bottom line for those of us who kill Metro is that Windows 8.1 is only a tiny step backward, which probably will be fixed in due course once the idiots at Yahoo discover that it breaks their email program in Firefox.

I have tried four installs today. It downloaded fine but it crashes at first reboot, it reboots a second time and tells me it cannot install on this PC which is Windows 8 with Media Center french. So far it kept the temp files on the SSD but the last time it all went away and now it wants to redownload the 4,35 GB again. It's going to kill my monthly cap. I quit. Not impressed.

I found it very frustrating using the 8.1 Pro ISO. I cannot upgrade the VMware Fusion Win 8.0 VM, even though VMware states their product is Win8.1-ready. If I run the setup.exe /auto:upgrade the upgrade (worked on two physical machines) starts, then stops right after "Checking a few things" - no messages.

First, what is up with the cute "Checking a few things" dialogs? This is unhelpful and probably a simple annoyance, but still, it's either pointless or unhelpful.

Second, I can start digging thru the logs of course but no exit code or failure message is not something I expect from a major update to a professional product.

If anyone has ideas on an upgrade failure of this nature, I'd love to hear them.

Only problem with upgrading Windows 8.1 preview on a Surface RT was the upgrade tile didn't appear in the store. A trip to the Microsoft site and following the links there solved that problem. A little bit unnerving that the download screen was blank with no progress indicator, apart from circling dots...

When updating my Sony Vaio Duo 13 (almost brand new) from Windows 8, the download phase appeared to be successful, but the process aborted with a message about incompatibility with the Bios. An upgrade for the Bios to make installation Windows 8.1 possible was available at the Sony website. My only gripe is that the second attempt at installation required downloading again of the whole update package (3.2gb). Maybe someone more computer savvy would have known where (or if) the original download was on my computer.

If you do a fresh 8.0 install you have to do all the updates available before you get the 8.1 update tile in the app store. So those of you with 8 who are not seeing the tile you might try doing all the available updates.

Some of you might want to hold off as there seems to be instances of black screen after updating. Posts suggest its a issue with the drivers for laptops with dual video chips. Have this on a Samsung ATIV 4. Great under Windows 8 but since 8.1 no display past the initial Samsung boot screen. Struggling to get my system back to a usable state.